Trisha Yearwood's Home Cooking

Pull up a chair: Trisha Yearwood is serving up some of her cookbook favorites. She's no four-star chef — but she's never tried to be. Nope, for this country superstar, the best home cooking is all about plenty of family around the table, and stories to be shared. Let's listen in.

Hanging out with the Yearwood clan, it's always wise to save room for seconds. Case in point: Two years ago, Trisha published a cookbook with her mom, Gwen, and sister, Beth, packed full of the Southern recipes the family loves best. Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen quickly landed on the New York Times best-seller list. So, like any good hostess would, Trisha quickly followed up her delicious first serving with an equally delectable second round: Home Cooking With Trisha Yearwood lands in stores this month. While the first book was mostly a collection of recipes from Trisha, Gwen, and Beth, Home Cooking gathers favorites from Trisha's aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. "I didn't want this book to be Volume II, More of the Same," explains the award-winning country artist. "So we cast a bigger net. A lot of these recipes, such as Uncle Wilson's stuffed bell peppers, were things I have eaten at family reunions and relatives' homes but had never made myself."

Trisha's food philosophy revolves around passion and simplicity. "A lot of people come up to me and say, 'I don't really cook very much, but I tried your meatloaf and it was so easy and delicious,'" says the singer, 45, who's also wife to country superstar Garth Brooks and stepmom to his three girls. "That kind of thing is the greatest possible compliment to me, because I think some of the best food is the most simple and basic stuff."

True enough: Salt and pepper are her spices of choice, bacon is a food group all its own, and cheese — well, don't get her started. "I love cheese, and I love cheese in everything," she laughs. "Macaroni and cheese is probably one of my favorite things in the world. I don't care if it's from a box or a school cafeteria. In this book, I've included a Crock-Pot recipe for mac and cheese that is one of the best things in the whole world. I can't make it that often, because I will eat the entire thing. But my motto's always been, Everything in moderation — including moderation."

Another (slightly more waistline-friendly) favorite in the Yearwood-Brooks household: Veggie Night. "In an effort to get more vegetables into all of our diets, we've instituted Veggie Night during the week, which the girls really love," Trisha says. "Everybody picks their favorite vegetable — and that can include mashed potatoes, because that is a vegetable! We end up with things like roasted carrots, green beans, and I love sweet potatoes and cooked cabbage. The girls will come home from school and go, 'Oh, yeah, it's Veggie Night!' — because it's all of their favorite stuff. It's also a great one for them to help with because there's a lot of peeling and chopping."

Trisha knows that good home cooking is a main ingredient in keeping families close. "When I was growing up, suppertime, as we called it, was when the family got together around the table — that was our family time," she reminisces. "And there were lots of nights we sat at that table for hours, far beyond supper, just laughing, talking, and having fun. Those dinners are some of the best memories of my childhood." That tradition lives on at Trisha and Garth's ranch in Oklahoma. "Having dinner together is something Garth and I have worked at making sure we do, because it's too easy these days not to. Everyone has their own agenda and is going in a million different directions," she says. "So for us, it's become, 'Now we're all going to sit down and the cells are going to be turned off and there are not going to be any iPods playing into anyone's ears. It's time for family.' And even if at first the girls are like, 'Really?' we end up having the best time."

Like any true Southern girl, Trisha is gracious and modest about the success of her first book, not to mention her own cooking chops. Her mother, she insists, is the real "cooking queen," and the first person Trisha calls when a kitchen disaster strikes. "My mom was raised on a dairy farm and was the only daughter with two brothers, so she learned to cook at a young age," Trisha recounts. "My grandmother cooked every day for 20 to 30 men who would come in from the fields. There was just this huge spread of homemade biscuits, gravy, chicken dumplings, cakes, pies, and more, and they made it look like it was the easiest thing in the world."

In fact, Trisha says one of the most important lessons she learned from her mother is that crowd-pleasing cooking doesn't have to be complicated. Sticking with the tried-and-true — or, as Trisha puts it, "good food you can't mess up" — is always a win-win situation. "My mom's much more fearless than I am. Everyone thinks I'm a chef now. I'm not; I just love to cook. I don't do anything really fancy. I'm all about how it tastes."

It's a philosophy Garth fully supports. When he and Trisha built their house four years ago, "the one thing Garth said was, 'I want the kitchen to be fantastic, and I want you to have whatever you want because you're in it and you enjoy cooking,'" Trisha recalls. "He didn't mean one of those kitchens that is so perfect and beautiful you don't even want to make toast in it. Our kitchen has plenty of room just to hang out; it's warm and fun and welcoming." And Garth's an active participant in it. "He jokes how, when he first got divorced and moved to Oklahoma and had the girls every other day, the three of them ate a lot of boxed macaroni and cheese and chicken tenders," Trisha says. But today, Garth is king of the hearty breakfast — and the inventor of the breakfast bowl featured in Trisha's new book. "He is really an experimental cook," Trisha explains. "He came up with this breakfast bowl, but it's not really a recipe. It's more like a bunch of really great things thrown into a bowl."

Trisha's dad, Jack, was also a master of savory inventions. His Brunswick stew was a family favorite. And his barbecued chicken, Trisha proudly shares, was a local legend: "If they were doing a big barbecue in town to raise money for something, the question from everyone would be, 'Is Jack cooking the chicken?' Because if he was, they would buy the tickets, he was that good." And although Jack passed away before he got to see the success of his family's first cookbook, putting it together "was a great and healing way for us to celebrate him," Trisha says. "Those recipes are how my dad lives on. Now we want to make sure that my sister's boys, my dad's grandsons, know how to make them too so they can carry on the tradition he started. I just have so many wonderful memories of him and our family — we were all so close — that not a day goes by that something will happen and I'll chuckle to myself and think how much my dad would have loved whatever it is. I feel like he's always around."

For Trisha, a recipe lacking in family tradition is as bland as a boiled potato. And if you can't serve up a little love and passion in your cooking, well, you might as well microwave a frozen dinner. "The experience of having people you love and care about at your dinner table is incredibly gratifying," she says. It's a feeling she inherited from her dad. "My dad loved that people loved his cooking, and he was, to a fault, apologetic every time he made something," she remembers. "He'd say, 'Maybe the chicken was a little overdone,' even though it was always perfect. And when I do that, Garth will say, 'Okay, Jack.'

"But the truth is, you just want so much for everyone to enjoy your food. And I get such satisfaction when other people love something I've made."